Artist: David Smith

Long considered the sculptor most closely associated with abstract expressionism, David Smith (1906 – 1965) was in fact a restless polymath for whom sculpture, drawing and painting formed a single creative current—sculpting by day and working on canvas and paper by night. This fall, Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood presents ‘Night Window. David Smith Spray Paintings, 1958 – 1964,’ an exhibition devoted to his pioneering Sprays, seldom-seen two-dimensional works that embody the artist’s gift for daring, even startling innovations of form and color, space and time, in every medium he chose.

Though he initially trained as a painter at the Art Students League in New York, much of Smith’s education took place on the factory floors of automobile and locomotive plants, where he acquired a hands-on mastery of metal that would make him the first known American artist to weld steel into sculpture. Through those experiences he came to view fabricated metal parts as inherently abstract forms freed from function, waiting to be transfigured. That perspective would redefine the cultural and material possibilities of sculpture over his 33-year career.

The Sprays emerged unexpectedly from Smith’s sculpture-making. As he assembled metal components on whitewashed sections of his shop floor, his welding process left scorched silhouettes on the ground beneath. Recognizing new artistic possibility in these traces, he began arranging scraps of metal, paper and found materials on canvas, then coating the surface with commercial spray enamel—an industrial material with no precedent in fine art. He would often return to the compositions with white paint to heighten contrast and sharpen the interplay of elements.

The results ultimately invert Smith’s exacting sculptural process so that negative space becomes structure, color becomes atmosphere, and absence becomes presence. For example, ‘Main Pribilof’ (1959) comprises a stack of white, black, red and grayish-blue shapes rising eight feet in a totemic column of floating, enigmatic forms suspended together in an almost otherworldly geometry.

Throughout the series, Smith’s large-format Sprays project shifting impressions of depth and atmosphere, evoking imagined landscapes or celestial realms—associations amplified by their sheer scale. First exhibited in New York in 1959 at French & Company, an Upper East Side gallery with a new contemporary art program advised by Clement Greenberg, Smith’s new works matched the ambition of the abstract expressionists and color field painters while also aligning him with a younger generation of artists exploring found materials and mechanical processes.

The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth also includes a selection of medium- and small-scale Sprays. Some of these works derive from machine-shop templates whose hanging holes are reimagined as compositional elements; others were made from paper or even food scraps laid down on canvas. The styles of abstraction range from sharper-edged forms to amorphous passages that seem to glow from within.